Facebook announced "Paper" today, a new app designed to help you discover news stories and topics you may not otherwise have found, share them with friends, and contribute to how your friends read the news yourself.

Paper isn't available yet—it'll be available for iPhones on February 3rd (and presumably iPad and Android after that, although a spokesman told Mashable there was no timeline for when exactly). When it is, new users will be able to install the app, sift through categories of interest, and read stories, articles, and updates shared publicly by their friends, by pages they follow, or by anyone else posting interesting stories to the public that they may otherwise never have seen. The topics of interest will range as widely as science, technology, and medicine all the way to photography and cute animals.

The goal of the app, according to Facebook, is to surface articles, news, and status updates that are posted publicly and are interesting, but go unnoticed even by people who would be interested. Similarly, Paper is designed to encourage you to put your take on the news and share it again with your friends. Still, most people already have a preferred method of getting the news, and time will tell if Paper will suffer from the issues that Facebook's News Feed does when it comes to organizing stories for you or selecting what you do and don't see. They've already said that editors at Facebook will control what stories are surfaced and which don't make the cut. Hit the link below to read more.